She could have become the Venus Williams of Albacete, the city where she spent much of her childhood. Tenacity and perseverance with the racket were not lacking. Nor negotiation skills. From a very young age, Yaiza Rubio (1987) stood up to her parents with an incontestable pact: they let her continue to progress in tennis to become a professional and, in exchange, she would get good grades at school.
He got to train up to five hours a day and travel every weekend to compete. “I was even a Davis Cup flag bearer. Imagine, the year before it had been Rafa Nadal!”, she exclaims with the same enthusiasm of that girl who at the age of four fell in love with the racket and who at the age of 17 gave up her dream of succeeding on the courts because “there is a moment when you have to decide: either train, or study. It doesn't give time to everything." She graduated in Information Sciences, but soon realized that this was not her thing.
By then he was already more into technology, programming and looking for Internet vulnerabilities. She little could imagine that a few years later she would become one of the women who knows the most about cybersecurity in Spain. And that Telefónica would entrust him with the mission of leading its strategy in the metaverse as Chief Metaverse Officer.
The metaverse is just one of many experiences that the nascent Web3 will enable. Unlike Web 1.0, that of all life, and Web 2.0, the name given to browsing social networks, Web3 is an evolution of the Internet that we now know. More decentralized, more secure and interactive.
“This all started with computers that worked with punched cards. It was very limited to give orders to the computer. Then came command line interfaces that let you enter commands with a keyboard. Now we can communicate with the machine by voice. The metaverse is the next leap and will allow us to have an immersive and, at the same time, more human, more natural interaction, thanks to extended reality technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. That distinction between the physical and the digital disappears,” explains Rubio, whose day-to-day moves between projects to make technologies such as blockchain, NFTs or cryptocurrencies accessible to ordinary citizens.
The first steps of the metaverse have been within the entertainment environment. But soon it will reach other areas of our lives: design, fashion, retail, art, education, work environments... Within not many years it will be normal to use virtual reality and augmented reality glasses, interact with avatars , or enjoy virtual leisure and work spaces in real time. A new environment full of immersive interfaces where, as Rubio correctly recalls, “everything remains to be built. We are working on the creation of standards, systems that make it possible for the user not to have to interact differently with each machine”.
Many of the advances in Web3 were announced at Telefónica's recent Metaverse Day. “Among them, the investment in Bit2Me, a cryptocurrency exchanger. In the future Internet users will be able to pay for products and services with tokens. Exchangers are the agents that make it possible to exchange these tokens with other types of currencies. In fact, Telefónica already makes it possible to pay with cryptos on tu.com, our sustainable technology e-commerce. And we have projects in Movistar to reward certain actions with tokens”, says Rubio.
Telefónica is advancing fast in the metaverse. The Rafa Nadal Academy or Ferrán Adriá's ElBulli are some of the initiatives that have already been launched in virtual environments. “We are going to transform Movistar's physical stores by applying virtual reality. We have also created immersive experiences in Horizon Worlds, Meta's virtual social platform, and we have launched the XR Experience Center as part of Telefónica's Innovation and Talent Hub”, explains Rubio. The next step is to move forward with a marketplace for NFTs that Telefónica has just recently launched to attract artistic talent in all fields. The tasks that Rubio leads are changing and require profiles as varied as engineers, product managers, 3D designers or experts in digital legislation. “I would encourage young people to look at these technologies. The metaverse is going to need very diverse professionals who are open to innovating.”
Yaiza Rubio mentally goes through these last fifteen years with a serene expression, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have been the first Spanish woman to participate in major international computer security meetings, such as DEF CON and Black Hat Briefings. Or having directed the first blockchain master's degree at a Spanish university. She has been at Telefónica for ten years and has passed through different departments. She has been a cybersecurity intelligence analyst for Telefónica, product manager for Smart WiFi or the Movistar Tokens rewards program. “I am a super normal person, but very restless”, she points out with a laugh.
She feels comfortable with her work, although she does not forget that in her beginnings, being a woman, a hacker and passionate about programming, made her almost a rare bird in her guild. “Society is changing. There is still a long way to go so that women have a greater presence in the IT sector, but nothing to do with what happened ten years ago, when there were very few women on the national scene dedicating ourselves to cybersecurity”. As a child, her reference was the tennis player Juan Carlos Ferrero. Now she is the benchmark for many young women who see in her figure the cocktail of intrepidity, intelligence and a sense of the future that the metaverse demands. “It is a world in which almost everything remains to be done. And that's good, because you can get confused. The important thing is to create and dare to move forward”.
In the virtual field, technology advances faster than legislation. "Today there is no regulation that we can rely on to create services," he explains. Those who do not need new regulations, nor do they pay attention to those that already exist, are cybercriminals. Nobody like her, who in 2017 was named an honorary cybercooperator by the National Institute of Cybersecurity (INCIBE), to make new generations aware of the risks of the new digital environment. “For me it was an honor to publish, together with Cristina Serret, The Adventures of the Cyber Team, an illustrated book where we address the advantages and risks of new technologies in a language adapted to primary and ESO children. In the schools or in the institutes there are no security references because all this is very new and there are still no technological profiles with this knowledge”.
They are small giant steps of a young rebel who one day decided to enter the intricacies of the digital universe to make it more accessible and safer.
